Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @02:40PM
from the semi-intelligent-potatoes dept.

NicknamesAreStupid writes "The NYTimes reports on a book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew P. McAfee (MIT director-level staffers), Race Against the Machine, which suggests that the true threat to jobs is not outsourcing — it's the machine! Imagine the Terminator flipping burgers, cleaning your house, approving your loan, handling your IT questions, and doing your job faster, better, and more cheaply. Now that's an apocalypse with a twist — The Job Terminator."
Reader wjousts points out another of the authors' arguments: that IT advances have cost more jobs than they've created.

...is a new version of the Amish where they shun all technology developed after, say, 2010. That way I can keep my job as a software developer, but I don't have to learn any of these newfangled technologies.

If you use and like the amenities that become possible with technology, then calling technology a "job terminator" is at best hypocrisy.

What a major fail in logic you have displayed there pal. What sort of logic system or formal model do you use where liking the amenities of technology is mutually exclusive/contradictory to calling such things a job terminator?

Seriously, what major brain fart. I like the amenities provided by technology. That doesn't prevent me from pointing out what is f* obvious, that automation in its current form has lead to a certain number of people not being employed (and not being able to find employment) anymore.

When you fill out on-line lines of credit applications robots decide on a variety of factors if you qualify or not! They can decide to approve or deny them, OR send them for human (I assume human) revision to approve or deny. So lets get rid of these robots! Except the ones that drive you, that would be pretty sweeet!

Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!

Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.

People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.

There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).

The issue is machine are moving up the spectrum from unskilled labor to skilled labor. Yes, picking rock and baling hay are chump jobs but think of where things are going.

For example, look at the advances Google has capitalized on for autonomous driving. I can easily envision the jobs of taxi driver, chauffeur, airline pilot and bus driver going away in a reasonable amounts of time. And just look at the skill gamut there. Commercial airline pilot is a bit more up the ladder than taxi driver. But with GPS an

Although there is always more work to do, that doesn't mean there's always people who want to do it. Interestingly enough, I think part of the reason for advancement in technology (on farms) was not only for greater profit, but also to replace the hard to find work. Sure, "anyone" could work the farm, but that doesn't mean they were any good at it OR they wanted to do it. Having read books about migrant workers, they were very poorly treated and extremely underpaid - both because they were "undocumented wor

Exactly. It's not automation that's the problem, it's competition! Food has to be cheap, or else it will be imported from countries where people are willing to work in deplorable conditions. Same thing with manufacturing. Our labour is expensive, while or goods have to be cheap.

Personally I don't think it'd hurt us too much if our food got slightly more expensive. A fine example of this is milk in Netherland. Many cattle farmers can hardly make a decent living while working insane hours. Of the price we pay

It's naive to think that you can pay every single person a living wage for every single job. In fact, it's considerably worse than naive, you either do not have a firm grip on reality, or you know nothing what so ever about economics.

Uh, it's you who don't have any grasp of economics.

Americans, even last year in a recession, made $12,357,113,000,000 in personal income. That's $42,000 a person, assuming it's spread over 300,000,000 people. (I don't know why we're paying a bunch of children, but let's jus

Because combines are specialized machines that can only replace one category of work and at a fairly high cost.

Robots are generalized machines which are cheap ($15k per year to lease and can "work" 2.5 shifts per day with 99% uptime- no benefits, no sick time- no vacation time- no lawsuits).

Any expensive thinking job can be offshored now.Any "no brainer" work can be done by a machine.A large number of medium skill jobs have been turned into applicaitons like Microsoft Office.Recepitionists have been replace

I for one support automation of everything that can be automated, but to play devil's advocate, agricultural automation has ruined that sector as a source of jobs. In case you hadn't noticed, economies everywhere used to be agrarian first, urban second. The agriculture industry can no longer support so large a percentage of the population financially, and what's left is more efficient as a conglomerate than a family operation. Both of which are as likely as not to hire people below minimum wage where more p

I think you're begging the question. Even if there was always more work to do in the past, that doesn't necessarily mean there will be in the future. However I don't even agree with that assumption.

Your grandparents were farmers and you are not, but that doesn't mean that machines destroying farming as a job leads to "more work." It just means that you found work elsewhere; somebody else very well may have not. You "took" somebody else's job, the machines didn't magically create it for you out of the rubble of the jobs they replaced.

I do agree with you partially: There is always work to be done, but not necessarily more work. Short of some extremely advanced and downright scary AI, there will always be jobs in this hypothetical world for programming the robots, and always work for mechanics repairing the robots. There will always be work to do in research. There will always be some degree of a service sector -- especially once we decide that those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job. But all these things will shrink. They will not support hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and even if they magically could not everybody is suited for these jobs.

And that's assuming most of the jobs left actually stay in the country, which there is little reason to believe that they will for areas like software.

There will always be work, but there won't always be enough work, and our system of values and economy will have to change in ways I can't even fathom the workings of.

"I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards)."

Plenty of us can do those things. We share our insights via the internet instead of by mimeographed newsletters. If we are "thrust backwards" the knowledge will survive and propagate. We have hundreds of years of technology to choose from.

Self and wife raise chickens, who are healthier because of what we learned on the internet even though we have plenty of farmer friends we also ask for info. We obtain parts for our 1937 Chevrolet truck (and our other trucks and motorcycles) via Ebay. I use Purox oxy-acetylene torches which are essentially unchanged since the 1930s. I learned about them via the internet, and can have most any part I wish in-hand in a few days.

Modern technology offers many ways to learn about less-modern technology. Being "thrust backward" is unlikely, but modern information tech makes learning about the spectrum of useful tech much easier.

I grew up before computers were commonplace. If anyone tells you those were "the good old days", punch them in the throat with my compliments.

Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States?

Dude, I hate to break this to you, but combines and tractors DID ruin agriculture jobs in the United States. Time was that a majority of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Now we're down to about 1% of the workforce.

And sure, in the past, all those displaced ag workers found other work, including doing things like building the tractors and combines. But if we get to the point (as suggested by TFA) where suddenly, large swathes of the workforce are being replaced all at once by robots... what then? The robots build themselves (not entirely, obviously, but without a lot of human labor required), so there's no help there.

There will always be more work to be done

I'm no longer so sure. In the not-too-distant future, a huge proportion of the workforce may be "made redundant", as the Brits say, by machines. What the hell are we going to do then?

People always do something with their time. It doesn't just get shelved, it's spent. So what happens when people are left unemployed? Two things really. Either they socialize and turn small events into larger ones, become introverted, or... focus their attention on others in a negative way. So while machines may provide food and shelter, people will spend more time on religion and criminal behavior. Flash mobs, war, self sacrifice. All of the emotions, behaviors, and other social constructs of humanity will

The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.

The problem with this absurd argument is that people want stuff, not jobs. The only reason you work a job is so you can buy the things you want/need. And if you don't have to work as much to get them, that's hardly a problem.

The problem is that we're not willing to accept an economic system that's more in tune with the realities of modern life. If there's less work to do, we need to improve the quality of life per unit of work ratio to keep people from falling into poverty simply because there's no work for them to do.

There's this crazy Protestant work ethic thing. So instead of everybody taking it easy we've converted all the excess workers who used to farm or do manual labour into people who sell us stuff, sue us, or entertain us.

The first step the government could take is to tax everything an employer gives to an employee equally.

Right now, my employer has to be very careful about adding another person to the payroll. It means many thousands of dollars per year in health insurance costs. They don't get that hit if they work me 60hrs/week, instead of hiring someone else and working us each 30hrs/week. The two at 30 would give them the benefit of redundancy, and they wouldn't have worn out employees. But those considerations pale in comparison to the fixed overhead costs.

So what you're saying is that socialized medicine is good for businesses?

....and now we can clearly show: taxes from the government help redistribute wealth accumulated through automation. Automation will DEMAND redistribution, or we will all starve in the midst of plenty.. which is a pretty stupid thing to do just to make one person obscenely rich.

And the sales guy who sold the machine, and the receptionist at the company where the sales guy works, and the engineer who designed the machine, and the workers who manufactured the machine (or the engineers who designed the automation of the manufacturing of the machine), and the programmer who programmed the machine, and the software engineer who designed the programming, and the tech writer who wrote the tech specs, and the trainers who trained the product, and the all of those peoples' managers.

You would greatly increase the job market (and raise the median income significantly) in this country with every one burger flipper replaced by technology.

It will be the new robotic socialism, every thing will be provided... you would just swear allegiance and adoration to those in power, sort of like North Korea but production will be done with robots instead of prisoners...

Any job that can be automated will be automated. Machines don't get sick, they don't take holidays, and they don't complain. Most important to business is the fact that they're cheaper.

The current system of economy and government will eventually have to change for the simple reason that a world where the only people with money are the owners of the machines isn't feasible. People need jobs to survive. I've spent time between jobs and on welfare, and it was boring as hell. I can't understand people w

"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: 'You don't understand. This is a jobs program.' To which Milton replied: 'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'"

'Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.'

The spoons/shovels thing is just a reductionist argument. In the end we want both 'canals' and jobs don't we---both products, productivity, and the means to distribute the resulting goods, services in a way that scales to the contribution given in creating them. Too much in either direction is silly.

The goal is always increased productivity. If it results in fewer jobs, that doesn't mean the increase in productivity is bad, it means your jobs retraining programs are inadequate. The point of the anecdote is that increasing jobs at the cost of productivity is counter-productive. You are better off building the canal with machines at lower cost, and using the money saved to create other jobs.

I've had similar thoughts myself. The problem isn't that machines are going to do jobs people now do, it's that people have been misled to believe their function is to do jobs. Your "job" is to live. Go outside. Have fun. Play with your kids. If we're lucky, someday all these mundane things we have to do now will not need to be done in the future. Your lawnba will cut your grass. Something will crawl up and down your house to paint it.

That said, there's really not a lack of useful work to be done. There's tons to be done in the sciences, for example. Medical research is wide open. There's so much we don't know yet.

There was a story about this involving some sort of super AI called Manna. It ended up essentially destroying the economy, I believe, and relegating everyone below the highest classes to concentration camps for poor people.

I don't know that their solution was ideal, but I do suspect that a post-scarce economy is what we need to investigate.

There used to be this sci-fi notion that one day, we'd have robots do all of our work, and it would free humanity to live fulfilling lives without toiling on stupid shit. Now we have robots doing all the work, but instead we've used this as an opportunity to impoverish the people who have been put out of work.

I'm an intelligence analyst. We're not going to outsource anything that requires a security clearance, and there's no automated software or hardware that can synthesize multiple disparate pieces of evidence into a coherent picture of the battlespace and an assessment of future friendly and enemy courses of action. Yet.

I don't care how good machines get there are certain 'service' jobs for humans that will always be in demand.;)

Seriously though, I was thinking of MMOs recently and the market for them. For the most part the target market is people who've had their lives made easier by machines. I can't see a machine coming up with all that World of Warcraft is.

The day that machines can come up with Facebook or World of Warcraft or the iPad or a best selling novel is when we have to worry. Machines that invent or c

It's really not even close to a new argument. The basic idea, put forward by the Luddites was that new technology makes workers more and more superfluous, ruining the lives of workers.

Karl Marx even took it a step further: He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.

Congratulations to them, they've discovered something Karl Marx talked about when he published Capital in 1867.

What this means is a question of social relations. What it could mean is less working hours for everyone, more vacation time, more time for studying and learning, more time for out-there R&D projects, all the while with ever-increasing wealth. But that would be if social relations were in one parameter. Currently it means mass unemployment, chronic debt crises, and IP patent lawsuits. It means bust and boom cycles where in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley pulled in any kid with a high school diploma interested in IT and had them working 60-70-80 hours for years, before casting them off into long-term unemployment.

Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring. We already see one thought of how this will be done in the US, with all this talk about privatizing Social Security and privatizing education into charter schools. Of course, there's little discussion of why the US spends so much on military bases in Cuba, or Italy, or Kyrgyzstan. Or why it needs 11 aircraft carriers, when there are only 20 aircraft carriers in the world, and only two countries with more than 1 (Spain and Italy). Aside from minor cuts that's not even a question, it's easier politically to cut money to the majority of old Americans or young Americans than the military empire.

Well, they are useful for beating up on countries that don't have the means to counter them - without having to beg for the use of airbases in neighboring countries. That does have some value.

However, their value is questionable indeed in any kind of serious war. I wouldn't count them out though with proper escorts - it is hard to attack a carrier if you don't know its general location, and that isn't as easy to work out in wartime as you might think. Radar is limited to the horizon and anything carrying

All of these ways in which people are losing work wouldn't be a problem if we let go of one fundamental idiocy in American job policy: the idea that more time worked is better.

Americans, in general, seem to think you're only worthy of a respectable income and worthy of overall economic security if you work at least 32 - 40 hours a week, and we're perfectly happy to see doctors, lawyers, programmers, and entrepreneurs pump out 80+ hours per week.

We're just about the only country dumb enough to do this. As automation and industrialization took a firm hold through Europe in the 20th century most of them allowed people more leisure time, effectively spreading the shrinking pool of necessary work across the population.

America, on the other hand, converted all or nearly all of the gains into standard of living increases, most of them not even measured in infrastructure or public works (much of which is in disasterously bad shape at the moment), but in personal possessions like luxury goods and larger homes.

So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts.

Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore.

So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas.

So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts. Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore. So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas. Seriously, we had it coming.

Something you didn't mention was this idea from the Puritans that the more work you do...the more you would be blessed. The flaws in this is you have those with the means who employ you believing you're stealing from them if you do less work...leave early...ask for time off or aren't sitting on your phone to jump at your master's voice at all times.

There was an on-call job I was at where if you finished the job for the day...you were required to put in face time until the end of the day or else you were

The "threat of automation" is finally getting attention because it's hitting the middle class. It hit machine tool operators decades ago.
There was an assumption that if you went to college, there's always be some kind of office job for your. That's ending. The world of paper pushing is coming to an end. The paper industry itself is hurting and mills are closing. At first, computers increased paper consumption, but that peaked years back.

I expected it sooner. I was surprised to see new office buildings going up after 2000 or so.

What does the future look like? The favelas of Rio and Mexico City, surrounding the cities of the rich. That's where productivity and capitalism takes us.

More stuff gets automated, more jobs lost, cost of living goes down because of automation, more jobs created.

I've used the same argument in the past, however, I've been somewhat swayed. Keep in mind, I'm not completely convinced that 99% of people will be out of work and robots will be doing everything. But, I do think there could be a fundamental difference between the oncoming wave of automation and the preceding ones.

The difference is in specialization. Before when new technologies replaced workers they replaced single jobs, and those people could create new jobs for themselves eventually. However, we are c

I don't think this will continue to be the case ; new tech creates new jobs only because humans are such flexible components of a working system.

Machine systems replace humans in a job when they approach or exceed the capabilities of the human in the same role. (They don't have to exceed the capability of a human to replace them - they just have to be more economic). As machines become capable of more, the number of roles in which a human can outperform a machine becomes smaller and smaller.

By definition, you need fewer workers for an economically viable system of robotic labour. And when you automate away cleaners (Roomba), register workers (self-service registers), and other menial jobs, you're not exactly opening up new working niches for these unskilled labourers.

A major news columnist, I forget who, recently proposed that maybe we are reaching the point where it is no longer a desirable social goal to have everyone in a job. I mean, the whole point of Progress is to eventually achieve a 100% unemployment rate, right? I'm libertarian to the core, but the idea struck me as one whose time may be coming.

True, but I believe the ratio is significantly greater, a support/maintenance team of 5 can take care of a system that replaces 100+ workers. Though I do say outsourcing is a larger threat then robots depending on your level and expertise. If you are a coder, customer relations etc... outsourcing is a bigger threat, if you are a laborer, manufacturing person etc... robots are a bigger threat.

If machines are used to the point that productivity becomes so high that many items become extremely inexpensive, then fewer people will need full time jobs in the first place, more people will work less and enjoy the benefits of a modern robotic world. The fact is before machines life was hard. Yes, no machines to take your place, but you worked virtually all day scraping out a meager existence which offered inadequate nutrition and limited options for shelter.

Remember that machines have made many things extremely cheap. Imagine a house being built with future concrete printing machines. A quality, strong home could cost a fraction of what a typical house is today. You could pay it off in 5 years, free and clear.

Just another perspective that shows there can be a bright side to automation. Maybe the ideal use of people is engineering and maintaining of machines and personal interaction with other people. Maybe working 70hrs a week and getting carpal tunnel is not an optimized use of a human being.

Because when we get to the point that the machines can do everything (including design and repair themselves) the free market will cease to exist. Once anyone can have anything he wants just by ordering a machine to make it happen, money will cease to have meaning.

Here's a novel idea. How about issuing everyone in the country with an equal share of the country's resources. And not a tradable share, as they'll just end up back in the hands of 1%. A share issued upon birth, thus diluting the value of everyones share, but destroyed upon death thus restoring value to everyone else's share.

You may want to look into Judaism. There originally was a land distribution scheme similar to this (albeit probably slightly imperfect and inequal due to the tools available at the time). Besides having land distributed to every family, every 50 years there was to be a Year of Jubilee in which any land that had been sold to pay debts was returned to the original owning family, among other things. The land was supposed to lie fallow one year out of every seven as well. Looked at through modern eyes, ther

I had a coworker that went to work on an automated harvesting farm implement. We will still need to deal with scarcity of certain elements but gathering raw materials, particularly organic ones can be theoretically solved with automation as well. For non-renewables, we probably can harvest from other galactic bodies much better with automation than with live human miners.

This has been the topic of a great deal of discussion. The problem is that in the current economy we live in, the benefit of greater and greater efficiency through human replacement by robots goes to a small handful of people. The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed. We are quickly heading towards a two class society, with all but perhaps a few hundred haves (and their families), and 7 billion have nots.

If you think of "Fair Trade" as a game (see game theory), this game is so designed such that the nature of human competition demands there must eventually be a winner, and the effect of technology is to ever accelerate the rate of play. A winner in this case resolves to one person, or a tiny group or family. This is why we have barriers to monopoly (the place where capitalism fundamentally fails to serve the greater population.) Sadly, over the last 30 years, the control rods have been removed from the reactor, the planets wealth and control has been placed in the hands of tiny few financial houses. A team in Zurich using a database of 37 million companies looked at the 43,000 critical transactional corporations on the planet and found that only 147 controlled the entire structure, and that these were primarily banks. [newscientist.com]

Add to that the accelerating trend to criminalize poverty, and the advent of "for profit" privatized prisons. We have a strategy to turn the vast majority of humanity into a captive resource. Add to that the separation of sexes in prison (controlling population growth), and one might conclude a program designed to sequester and control humanity is now fully under way. Ever since the French Revolution, the rich and powerful have exquisitely been clear where the threat to their control lies. They now have the resource and the means to manipulate large populations. We are left misinformed, confused, angry, and impotent.

I'm not saying this is happening, and these observations may represent naturally emergent phenomenon, that is a global system like ours may naturally tend to resolve into a small controlling class. It demands that we begin to look at what kind of world we actually hope to live in, and press for that. One possible outcome is that people are issued stock at birth (retroactively) on global corporations so as they lose their jobs, the growing robotic economies provide them with a life long pension and high quality of life. That way all people can participate in technological advance fairly and equally. This is only one possible ideam there are many. We simply need to ensure that human life remains a precious and the quality of that life remains sacred.

There was a great short story about this, the gist was that robots made everything and made more than people needed. So poor people were forced to consume. They had to eat so much food, live in big houses, make sure they wore out pants and things. Rich people had modest homes.

No one had to work, except the poor, who had to work to consume the unbalanced output from the robot factories.

Nuclear is OK as an intermediate. But Uranium is still a finite mined resource. It makes sense to look to renewables as much as possible. They are the only long term energy solution. There's more than enough renewable energy in the environment to serve everybody. It's just a case of having the will to harness it.

Good point, on another note I wonder if there is a maximum attainable amount of natural renewable energy sources before capturing them (and thus dissipating the energy) becomes detrimental to the planetary existence as a whole such as limiting wind/tidal motion to ineffective lows. Maybe that amount or energy is so high it's almost irrelevant because we should be off the planet by then.

There certainly is that point, though what would be considered "detrimental" seems to be questionable (see also: Climate Change Debates). Hydroelectric has some of the most directly visible effects (i.e. a giant pile of water held up by the dam) and the effects on wildlife are easily observed. Other forms will have more subtle effects -- slightly reduced wind-speed past a wind farm, changes in localized heat distribution and re-radiation around various solar traps, presumably some changes to ocean current

Okay, let's try Star Trek as a decent talking attempt. They occasionally lightly laughed at the Ferengi for being money grubbers, while everyone else tried to be lofty. Replicators are big in this.

Thing is, there WAS an "underground economy" running on Star Trek - Positional Meritocracy. Only if you were good enough did you get to serve on the Enterprise, and a couple squeaked by. So that show was fairly free of backhanded deals, but you can bet the ____-class crews in real life would cut deals to get a for

My recollection is that it only came into use as something that humans used with the execrable Deep Space Nine.

Hi! Your opinions are wrong, and you should feel bad. TOS mentioned money and wages in the context of humans a few times, it was only in TNG that the whole "we're beyond money and serious interpersonal conflict" thing got pushed by Roddenberry (whose death during the early years of TNG, incidentally, allowed it to become a better show, since he had become overly dedicated to Mary-Sueing the h

Folks, our society is a patchwork of thinking, social constructs and memes generated during a two thousand year period when life was brutal, vicious, violent, filled with poverty, plague and horror. Even the last 300 years of industrial revolution, though amazingly better than the dark ages before them, were marked by gross dehumanization, global war, profound degradation of the natural environment, humanity as commodity, rampant corporatism, concentration of wealth and the creation and now growing destruct

I'm sorry the 3 laws are crap. They are so general, so poorly defined, so open to interpretation and semantic contortion, that they mean exactly zilch. For example; A robot needs to make a choice between saving one person or saving 20, because it can't do both, what does it do? Blow a fuse or break the laws, that's what. Give the robot the ability to choose greater good, and now your robot has everything it needs to decide it should control human reproduction for our own good. Or control human violence, or

At that point "unemployment" becomes "I decided to become an artist because I know I'll never starve to death."

Absolutely. But there are a lot of other changes needed to make that happen. Currently, a lot of people, when they have no work to do, and have resources supplied (welfare) don't choose to do anything as noble as being an artist. They sit at home watching daytime TV, getting bored and fat and letting their kids create trouble in the neighbourhood. That isn't inevitable. But it's a problem that needs to be fixed. And it's bigger than just education.

Have you heard about the paralegals and trainee lawyers that are being replaced by robots? Five years ago that would have been an absurd worry, but it's started happening. Just about nobody has noticed yet, and they aren't replacing anyone who already has a job. They're just being used instead of hiring entry level people in a few places. So far quite effectively. (They're optimized for searching out prior relevant legal cases.) Here each robot only replaces a couple of

If there were more people needed to maintain them than the amount they replaced, there would be no economic drive for automatization. A company will only choose robots when it can fire people in return.

You're assuming a closed system. As an American, would you rather see an automated factory in America that employs five Americans for decent wages, or a work camp in China that pays slave wages to a hundred Chinese?

For sure, there are people like that. A lot of people like that. In the current way society works. That doesn't mean that with education, abundant resources, and widespread organisations dedicated to worthwhile things to do which aren't work, that this needs necessarily be true in the future.

I can think of things I'd much rather do than be directed to tasks by an employer. I'm sure most people could.

No, it's been known since at least sometime in the 30s that there would be less and less need for labor in the future. What wasn't foreseen was the willingness of the working class to allow wealth to collect at the top and the increased consumption of things that people don't particularly want or need.

Back then it was expected that in the future the normal work day would shrink from 8 hours to something more like 3 hours as workers got more done in less time. Basically failing to account for robber barons that tend to screw up such things and assuming that people would continue to support their own best interests.

That's true. The problem was everybody thought we'd have the Jetson's future. The (clearly, horribly, mistaken with hindsight) assumption has that if two workers worked an 8 hour day, then along came some new piece of technology that meant they could do the same amount of work in 4 hours, the two workers would work 4 hour days and have 4 extra hours of leisure time to enjoy the fruits of man-kinds ingenuity. What they didn't realize, but should have been blindingly obvious, is that the company that hires those two people would, instead, just fire one of them and make the other guy do BOTH jobs in an 8 hour day. So instead of the 1950's era vision of a future utopia with people doing less work and enjoying their life more, we have half the people unemployed (and miserable with no money) and the other half over worked (and miserable with no time).

It dates back a lot further than that. The Luddites were destroying machines back in the 1810s on the basis that the machines would put them out of a job.

The framing of the question is wrong. People don't necessarily need jobs. Certainly not repetitive ones, boring or drudge ones such as a machine might replace. What they need is the means to put a roof over their heads, care for their families and to have an equitable standard of living.

If a machine replaces a boring or drudge job, that's unquestionably a good thing. If people are struggling to have a decent life because they don't have means, then society needs to change and deal with that.

What are you talking about, we enabled them to program themselves years ago! http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2362

But in all seriousness, I think computers and robots taking on more jobs is a GOOD thing, something we should encourage more. The debate at that point needs to shift, less jobs, more people unemployed, why would we have fewer and fewer people toiling away (harder and harder the way companies are pushing employees) with so many free bodies available? A more fundamental economic and societal shift

I agree. Now, I'm aware that I'm stirring up a hornet's nest here, but I think we, as a society, have just about wrung out all we can from the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. It's had a good run and certainly outlived communism, but there is simply no one society model that is good for all time. Feudalism was okay for many years until society out-grew it. The industrial revolution made capitalism the best model for society, but now the information revolution demands different models of society. Inevitably